Exam Professional Cloud Database Engineer topic 1 question 20 discussion

Actual exam question from Google's Professional Cloud Database Engineer

Question #: 20
Topic #: 1

[All Professional Cloud Database Engineer Questions]

Your customer is running a MySQL database on-premises with read replicas. The nightly incremental backups are expensive and add maintenance overhead. You want to follow Google-recommended practices to migrate the database to Google Cloud, and you need to ensure minimal downtime. What should you do?

A. Create a Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) cluster, install MySQL on the cluster, and then import the dump file.
B. Use the mysqldump utility to take a backup of the existing on-premises database, and then import it into Cloud SQL.
C. Create a Compute Engine VM, install MySQL on the VM, and then import the dump file.
D. Create an external replica, and use Cloud SQL to synchronize the data to the replica.

Show Suggested Answer

Suggested Answer: D 🗳️

by range9005 at Dec. 21, 2022, 2:22 p.m.

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dynamic_dba

Highly Voted 1 year, 11 months ago

D. The question says backups and maintenance are an issue, so moving to a managed service (Cloud SQL) would be the right thing to do. That eliminates C and A. Option B could (depending upon the DB size) require a lot of downtime to export, copy the dump file to Cloud Storage, then import into Cloud SQL. Therefore, the least amount of downtime would be D. https://cloud.google.com/sql/docs/mysql/replication/configure-replication-from-external

upvoted 8 times

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RaphaelG

Most Recent 1 year ago

The only issue that I have with the D answer is that an external replica is an explicit Cloud SQL concept not a MySQL concept; external replica is when you have a primary instance already in Cloud SQL, however, if you have your MySQL on premises then you are dealing with replication from an external server. I have read documentation for CloudSQL for MySQL before and I am more convinced with B to be frank

upvoted 4 times

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kkjw

1 year, 5 months ago

External replica is a setup with primary on cloud an the replica external to the cloud .eg.e on prem.. which is the reverse of what the question is looking for

upvoted 2 times

2 years ago

Correct answer is D: Create cloudsql replica of on-prem server and promote with almost-no downtime by pointing app to cloudsql. mysqldump is heavy and time-consuming operation (even though if you run it on on-prem read-replica, it will be identical to migrating to cloudsql using managed database migration service.

upvoted 4 times

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